The role of marketing in today’s enterprises

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of marketing in today’s enterprises and examines the antecedents of the marketing department’s influence and its relationship with market orientation and firm performance. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from the West (i.e. the USA and Europe) and the East (i.e. Asia). Partial least squares (PLS) was used to estimate structural models. Findings – The findings support the idea that a strong and influential marketing department contributes positively to firm performance. This finding holds for Western and Asian, and for small/ medium and large firms alike. Second, the marketing department’s influence in a firm depends more on its responsibilities and resources, and less on internal contingency factors (i.e. a firm’s competitive strategy or institutional attributes). Third, a marketing department’s influence in the West affects firm performance both directly and indirectly (via market orientation). In contrast, this relationship is fully mediated among Eastern firms. Fourth, low-cost strategies enhance the influence of a firm’s marketing department in the East, but not in the West. Research limitations/implications – The paper assumes explicitly that a marketing department’s influence is an antecedent of its market orientation. While the paper finds support for this link, the paper did not test for dual causality between the constructs. Originality/value – Countering the frequent claim in anecdotal and journalistic work that the role of the marketing department diminishes, the findings show that across different geographic regions and firm sizes, strong marketing departments improve firm performance (especially in the marketing-savvy West), and that they should continue to play an important role in firms.